Terry Marotta: Those who trail shoppers

Remember all the time you put in as a child while your own grownups shopped?

When I was little and my family went away summers, we bought our food from an old-time country grocer who stored the cookies in big open bins and sold everything from Rheingold beer to bottom round beef.

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While our mom dealt with this lantern-jawed owner as he personally fetched every last item on her list for her, my sister and I waited. And waited.

Sometimes we stuffed the Rheingold ballot box, voting for the girl we thought should win the big annual beauty contest. Once or twice we palmed a couple of cookies, stuffing them down the waistband of our shorts. (She just took so LONG; we never would have turned to larceny and election fraud otherwise - or so we told ourselves in agonies of guilt afterward.)

And who can forget how bad it was in department stores, where, as a child, you'd try playing Hide and Seek under the carousels of clothes to keep occupied while your grownups pawed the goods?

Sometimes you had to hold their coats for them while they chose items and tried them on.

Everyone feels foolish when draped like a coat-rack this way.

Which is why my heart goes out to the men you see in stores, trailing after their wives and holding all their belongings.

I saw a man at a big box hardware store last week, pushing a cart with a seven-foot palm tree in it, while his woman hurried on ahead of him.

His eyes met mine from behind the riot of greenery.

"I'm in here somewhere!" he said sheepishly.

"I can identify," I said back. "Many's the giant palm I've wheeled around in a shopping cart. You feel like you're pedaling a bicycle with an elephant on the handlebars."

"Right," he said. "But I bet the palm tree was your idea."

"Well, yes, I guess it was."

"Quick!!" his wife was now calling over her shoulder as she hurried on ahead. "Now to the discount Christmas trees!"

It was still that time of year in most stores, when they were moving out the artificial trees and winking elves to make room for whatever big sales might follow. (Burrowing tools for Ground Hog Day? Axes for to remember George Washington by?)

He paused as she raced around the corner toward the aisle marked "Seasonal."

"I'm hiding now," he said with a big smile on his face.

I smiled too.

"You can run but you can't hide," I told him.

"She'll find me, of course," he said.

"Of course! We always find you," I said.

"Don't I know it!" he said, and off he trundled with his extra-wide load.

He was a man resigned to his fate.

Anyway, his attitude was one of quiet resignation.

Really it's the only attitude you can adopt when you find yourself in the wake of determined shoppers. You just have to pray you don't end up holding ALL their coats.